I daresay many of my dr rdrz have already encountered this (siiiiigh): I longed for novels about female desire - women empowered by sex and their expressions of lust. So I sat down and wrote my own.
Which seems to me to be doing for its different genre what so many authors have done for science fiction/fantasy - i.e. not actually read any, or at ( Read more... )

Pet cemeteries reprised: [O]wners of all kinds of domestic animals have become more likely to believe in a pet afterlife: A new analysis published in the journal Antiquity, examining the history of pet cemeteries in Newcastle and London over 100 years from 1881, found an increase in the proportion of graves that reference the animals’ immortal ( Read more... )

Great White Sharks discovered having a Close Encounter, Doing Their Wild Thing.
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The guerrilla rewilder shaking up British farming: Derek Gow is winning over doubters in his bid to reintroduce storks, beavers, wildcats, water voles and much, much more.
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National Trust encouraging people to tune in to the sounds and sights of nature and will ( Read more... )

I noticed on Twitter this morning somebody asking that question, which is similar to other questions asked on The Books That Made Me (The book that changed my life, The book that had the greatest influence on my writing), for people to provide instances of: [T]he single most important work of fiction you’ve ever read.... Just the one that’s ( Read more... )

Saw a discussion on Twitter earlier today about the YA category of books, which apparently somebody had claimed was some new millenial thing? and people were saying no, it went back earlier than that -

- and I went to myself, hang on, when I was But A Young Thing, Penguin Books put out a list for people who had slightly outgrown Puffins for the ( Read more... )

You know, I'm not even sure it's the delight of discovering new things in the previously enjoyed: I think sometimes if you enjoy a thing, it can become a reliable source of repeated and recurrent enjoyment, though this is personal idiosyncratic and are not headphones a wonderful invention so that we do not infuriate other people by playing some ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished London Clubland, which was really quite good once it got going into the intricacies of the subject as well as some broader contextual questions. Very much about a particular epoch - really, mid-Victorian era to the Great War. A little on origins but those are (from the citations) written up in more detail elsewhere.
Discovered ( Read more... )

- Lo, this thing is the next thing.
[T]he joy of divorce parties.
Okay, rites de passages, they are a thing, and the article cites cultural traditions which have rituals to mark the transition from married life to singledom. In Judaism, a divorce document called a get is presented from husband to wife, in the presence of rabbis and witnesses, to ( Read more... )

Why playtime for adults won’t bring your childhood back.
Is this a thing? No, really, is this a thing? If you live in Seattle, you may now participate in something called Adult Recess, which aims to recreate the joys of an American school break time, with kickball, hopscotch, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches - but minus the bullying. “I ( Read more... )

Dept of, private behaviour and public space: maybe it's a generational thing, but really, I'm not really there for policing whether people are wanking in the workplace loos, providing they're not doing it for amounts of time that impact on their, er, performance; and providing they 'leave this place as you would wish to find it', which is surely ( Read more... )